Art Matters by Anne Anlin Cheng
In recent decades, museums all over the world have been criticized as repositories of imperial and colonial rapacity. But museums are also spaces for critical remembrance, crucial holders of the past and how that past continues to shape our present. This is especially vital given our current political moment, when inconvenient histories are being systemically and institutionally erased. University museums in particular should be treasured because they have, among their multiple missions, an explicit commitment to education. The recently reopened Princeton University Art Museum is exciting for those of us who teach at Princeton because its new facilities expand what had always been its curators’ and staff’s commitment to collaborative involvement with University curriculum.
This fall I am teaching and collaborating with the Museum at Princeton and the Museum of Modern Art in New York on a new undergraduate seminar called “Girls and Dolls,” an interdisciplinary course that studies the complex relationship between girlhood and dolls at the intersection of literature, art, and theory. Girls and dolls are so culturally intertwined that their affinity—even conflation—is often taken for granted. But what are the social, cultural, familial, psychic, and affective functions of the doll in the education and articulation of femininity, especially in the transition from the Victorian era to the modern, from the age of imperialism to late capitalism? What is the doll’s role in the pedagogy of care and of being cared for, for mothers, daughters, and citizens? What is the role of “play” in the sociology of kinship, sociability, and commodification? These small, domestic, and seemingly trivial objects (in various incarnations, from toys to cyborgs) have played fraught and resounding roles in world history, imbricated with large sociocultural categories such as gender, race, class, family, nationhood, commodity aesthetics, finance, and technology. Many of the art objects we will study in this class—the uncanny dolls by Ruth Bernhard, surreal visions by Hans Bellmer, a shadow puppet by Mari Katayama, a papier-mâché husk by Peng Wei, and more—come from the Museum’s extensive and diverse collections. For this course, students will get to study such objects both in the galleries and object study rooms.
Imagine thinking about Black girlhood while reading Toni Morrison; looking at the art of Iona Rozeal Brown and Lorna Simpson and learning about the key role played by a couple of dime-store dolls in the desegregation of our nation; contemplating dolls and femininity as the uncanny emblem of birth and death; considering the coupling of inanimate personhood and animated objectness at the turn of the twentieth century through a conversation staged between Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Cornell, and Ruth Bernhard! I find these kinds of unexpected meetings across disciplines truly generative and exhilarating.
I don’t know if the students will fully recognize what a special gift it is to have the Museum as a partner in this class. To be able to study firsthand works of art in the original is a privilege, not only because one gains access to what the philosopher Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of an original work of art but also because one can see that which is not possible via reproduction: scale, texture, medium, color, strokes, other traces of the artist’s hands, and so much more that is necessary for the task of close reading.
Years ago, when I was myself an undergraduate at Princeton, the University used to have a loan program from which students could check out a work of art for the semester. It is hard now to imagine the kind of trust that such a public service program required, but I will never forget that my roommates and I had, every semester, a piece of original art in our dorm room. One semester, I recall, we had a small drawing by M. C. Escher whose intricacies and shifting perspectives reminded me of what I was doing in literary studies, my other burgeoning love: learning the pleasures and rewards of opening oneself up to multiple perspectives and approaches. I think that was the beginning of my sense of how art can help you think. That memory is even dearer now because I get to share the resources of the Museum as a teacher. Today the Museum reaches out to students in multiple ways, from public lectures to film screenings to art workshops. This openness is reflected in the spaces of the newly designed Museum. This fall, when I am with my students in the Museum, I hope they too will come to experience it as a place of intellectual creativity and intimate reflection.
